Does anyone deserve to be poor?

The Nobel winning economist, Gary Becker, whose work on human capital I deeply admire writes a piece called Deserving and Undeserving Inequality in the blog which he shares with Richard Posner. In it he distinguishes between good inequality (deserved) and bad inequality (undeserved) saying

The great majority of people in different cultures do not object to someone who has made lots of money when they have superior abilities and talents, and they work hard at producing what are considered useful goods or services.

The meritocratic society with upward and downward social mobility would be in Becker’s view the most acceptable form. In this just society, the cream always rises to the top. He cites actors like Tom Hanks and Jennifer Anniston, entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and skilled professionals like transplant surgeons who have grown rich by applying their exemplary talents and skills.

In contrast, Becker poses the problem society seems to have with hedge fund managers who make use of arbitrage (momentary bargains unnoticed by the market) to make huge sums of money. He lumps them together with speculators, Russian oligarchs and monopolists who enrich themselves through unfair, uncompetitive means (the latter two through government fiat).

Becker of course uses human capital theory as his framework for addressing this issue. Under its framework, individuals who acquire knowledge and skill through education and training (one cannot gain it any other way as it cannot be inherited or passed on) deservedly earn private returns in the form of higher incomes over the remainder of their working lives.

A meritocratic society should in Becker’s view reward the investments made by individuals in themselves and not rely on some other criteria. Elitism, the polar opposite of meritocracy rewards individuals for investing in other things (social standing or being raised on the right side of the tracks, marrying into the right family, etc).

It all sounds rational and justified, which is why Becker says “the great majority of people in different cultures” accept the legitimacy of a certain form of inequality. The wisdom of crowds is evident, until we start to consider the actual “merit” of the argument.

Economic, behavioral and neuro scientific research has demonstrated for instance that when it comes to employment, so many other factors aside from talent and intelligence determine the outcome of a hire/fire decision. Tall, handsome, Caucasian males for instance tend to earn more than their peers of equal and (as labor economist Daniel Hamermesh demonstrates) of even higher educational attainments.

If you are a plump woman working alongside office waifs, then you are more likely to be laid off during an economic downturn compared to your skinny female counterparts. In fact, studies in the US and replicated in other parts of the world show that job applicants could even be screened out simply because their names sound ethnically diverse (those with names such as ‘Tamika’ for instance got less callbacks from recruiters compared to those who had typically Anglo-Saxxon names like ‘Sally’).

The ‘good-bad’ dichotomy looks awefully strained at this point.

Reflecting on this a bit, I begin to wonder, how much of our lot in life really depends on our own actions, and how much of it depends on chance. In fact, beyond just the narrow hedonic enjoyment of earning more money, if the pursuit of happiness were to be the ultimate measure of success, then we could find an even bigger divide opening up.

About 50% of our ability to have a pleasant life depends on our genes, which is not very modifiable, according to psychologist Martin Seligman (other studies suggest this could be as much as 60%). This would not be good for those who weren’t born with the right disposition.  Of course, for those who are disadvantaged in this way, they can still influence their level of happiness by focusing on the residual aspects of life that can be modified to produce happiness, a mere 15-20%. That is if they can afford to pay for therapy which again disadvantages those who happen to be residing at the bottom of the economic ladder.

As James Kwak who recently re-read John Rawls’ A theory of Justice, has said

well-educated, hard-working people did not deserve to make more money than other people, at least not as a normative (as opposed to a utilitarian) matter.

Kwak quotes the passage from Rawls’ treatise to support his claim

[The liberal conception of the second principle of justice] still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents. Within the limits allowed by the background arrangements, distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune. . . . Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances.

At work, I am currently involved in developing and implementing a pilot project that seeks to help socially disadvantaged groups improve their learning and employment outcomes through a range of interventions. Social disadvantage comes in many forms. The issues encountered by our case officers usually involve multiple and complex needs such as drug and alcohol abuse, inter-generational poverty, lack of economic opportunity where they live, sexual abuse, abandonment, domestic violence, discrimination, disability both physical and mental.

Unfortunately much of Australian mainstream society sees these individuals as “bludgers” or people who leech off the tax and welfare system. The mainstream of society cannot really see why they can’t just find work in a country where there are skills shortages in many industries. I must admit, I used to subscribe to this way of thinking too.

This is reflective of meritocratic aspirations Aussies share with their American and British counterparts. A study by Dan Ariely and featured recently by PBS finance correspondent Paul Solman demonstrates this. Respondents were given three pie charts resembling the spread of wealth in unnamed countries. The first showed an equal distribution of wealth. The second showed a slight advantage to the two top quintiles. The last showed a very disproportionate concentration of wealth to the top 40%.

They were asked to specify which country they thought the US represented. Most went for the pie chart that showed a slight skewing of wealth to the upper classes. They were unaware that it was actually the third chart which they thought represented a third world country which represented the US. And yet, as the piece by Solman suggests, there is a lack of appetite among voters for tax reforms that would correct such a lopsided distribution of income and wealth.

At least in affluent countries, there is a system for attending to marginal groups. In less developed countries, the problem of addressing poverty, inequality and social disadvantage is harder because of scarce resources. Even in countries like China and India which have lifted millions out of poverty, this mostly depends on where people live. Those who reside along coastal provinces in China tend to have higher incomes than those that live in the interior whose incomes are closer to some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In a middle income country such as the Philippines that has experienced growth but not a lot of change in its distribution of wealth, the experience has been that such growth has not been inclusive. Not only is economic opportunity not evenly distributed in the population, but this distribution itself seems to be perpetuated by laws and policies of successive governments.

I say this because the sorts of reforms that have been proposed to address disadvantage, namely tax reform, land reform, and reproductive health have been held back or denied the kind of support, moral, political, and financial, required for them to be implemented correctly. There are two kinds of attitudes that might be responsible for this:

1. Self serving bias is the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. Thus, those who are well-off tend to think they deserve their successes.
2. Just world phenomonon is the tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people "get what they deserve." So those who hold this belief look at poverty and social inequality and think that those who suffer from them deserve to be where they are.

These forms of ‘cognitive bias’ may lead us to misapprehend the problem of social disadvantage and inequality to the point that we may even claim self-righteously that certain outcomes are just when in fact they are not. I certainly have come to reconsider my views on this. What about you?